I’m so glad you stopped by. Despite, the name of my blog, we struggle with this issue. We decided on Mom and Mama because I am from the west, and growing up, I didn’t know anyone who called their mother Ma. It was always Mom or even Mother. My wife is a townie. Around here, Ma (spoken with a Boston accent MAAAH) is common. I became Mom and she became Ma. However, our son doesn’t talk yet, and he may have other ideas.

Mom and Mama, or some variation thereof, is the most common solution I have seen.

I have also seen kids with gay moms call them “Mommie Jane and Mommie Kay” but I think you want to get away from gender roles, and this doesn’t solve your problem at all.

I grew up with a girl with hippy parents who called her mom and dad by their first names. I’m not that into this though because it was kind of confusing. I was stunned to learn that this “Rob and Sharon” she always talked about, were her parents.

I have seen Mom and Nana, but Nana is how lil’ guy and his cousins refer to their grandmother, so I am not really into this one either

Polly over at Lesbiandad.net answers to Baba which means “Father” in several languages. You are still getting into gender roles, just foreign ones, but it works for some people.

I am asking around for you. Do any of the lesbian moms out there have any really great ideas?

I also want to recommend this book. It is a bunch of exciting essays written by the non-biological mother. A lot of them mention this very issue.

baba meaning father in several languages got me to thinking what about mother in other languages… from your family origins (unless there from england!)i’m aboriginal so mum= guni, dad=bubaa. that doesn’t help with gender based issues, so a word that means something to you could work.(heart=gii, star=miri) sorry not very creative.

Baba also means grandmother or wise woman in some languages. Ema is mother in Hebrew. We considered that but neither of us wanted to be Ema. I think that fact that Baba is easy to say early on was a selling point for me. Also Robin and Baba have the b sound in common.

and just to share maybe a little but, my girl is supposed to start her cycle tomorrow so hopefully we’ll be concieving within the next few weeks.i am hopeful, nervous, anxious, but mostly excited!!we can’t wait to be parents.and it’s comforting to know that we aren’t alone and that we aren’t the first…although in our community, we kinda are.everyone has been very supportive and very inquisitive so far, i don’t want to say that it’ll result in our community having more families but it probably will. everyone i know keeps asking me everything about the process we’re going thru now.i am happy to share everything i’m learning but at times, especially when we are out socially, it’s all everyone wants to talk about…i understand that it’s a quite a big deal for our community but it’s a bigger deal for my girl and i, and as patient a person as i am, sometimes i wish people would let us have some privacy while we’re doing this.in the long run, it might make for more playmates with friends kids’ though when they do it.i am sure however of one thing, our kid is going to have a million auntie’s that are going to spoil the s*@! out of him or her.thank you again.i am still looking at names and if i find any new ones, i’ll keep you all posted.i may even start my own blog!

I wanted to add a little more color commentary on Baba, which, in addition to being short for Babushka (grandmother), is indeed a word for “father” in lots of languages (nifty little page here). I was thrilled, by the way, to see that Robin calls herself Baba (or rather her daughters do). I’m a faithful reader of her blog (and her essay in Confessions of the Other Mother — thanks for the plug!). She was the first person I learned of who came to this name, and the fact that her process of arrival was independent from mine made it feel even more right to me.

You know, the gender binary is a big ole thing. I am far, far more interested in chipping away at its edges than leaving it intact and merely aligning myself with one side of it (in this instance, w/ parental naming and roles, the supposed “male” side). I think it takes a great deal of effort to forge a transcendent third option (what one might be able to call a Middle Path, to borrow from the language of Buddhist philosophy). I think some of that work is done by the very act of a woman borrowing from and reshaping language, or even a social role, that has up ’til now been the exclusive domain of men. Or at least that’s what I think I’m doing. I also think it’s useful to remember that being partner with a woman is in the eyes of many the exclusive domain of men, as is the process of supporting a woman through pregnancy and, side by side with that woman, raising a kid as co-parent.

So when I call myself Baba, and my kids do, I know it’s me, a biological female, that’s being Baba. I’m being a special kind of parent. I want to help create more space for us lesbian non-birth moms to actually BE something. Not a NON- something. But a SOMETHING. With a proper name. That’s why I feel like for me, the name Baba, kind of does slowly take on the heft of a proper name. I’m not just called Baba, I’m a Baba, if you know what I mean. It’s true that for me, a Baba is a kind of both/and sort of parent: both mom and dad, or parts mom and dad. So my kind of Baba does feel “genderqueer,” to a degree.

But ultimately I think we’re all stuck in a rut, thinking that parental roles have to be gendered and in two different ways only. They have been, but they needn’t be, exclusively. There could be three options, there could be two of the same kind. Sex and gender are really different things, and the # of genders does not, and should not, be limited to the # of biological sexes. And gendered parental roles, I believe, follow the same logic. No doubt, LGBT parenting is the thing changing all that.

Hope all this doesn’t twist your brain up into a pretzel. It kind of did mine, upon rereading it. But it’s clear in my heart. Sorry for the tome!

ZAZI is swahili for Parent. We liked this one because we wanted to steer clear of any gender stereotypes. Plus, it was easy for the kid to learn and say from the start. Good luck on your hunt for the right name :)

Been pondering this and I always liked the idea of using Ma and then your first initial, like Ma J or Ma B.
It ends up coming out “Mah-jay” or “Mah-bee”, which to me sounds like more of a word and therefore more personal than Mama J or Mommy Beth and the like.

It works for some letters better than others (not sure I’d want to be Ma-C/ mossy, but whatever works :-D ). I don’t like the word Ma at all but when you add that, I do!

And, if one of you like this and the other wants to be mama/ mommy/ mom or whatever, it still works!